[MD] Is this proper conduct?

[david buchanan]

Arlo, Krimel, Marsha and all: 

Arlo said:
Yeah, I agree. [That it looks like Krimel been trying to provoke a fight for the last couple of days.] This is just the latest reboot of the "Enlightened Prophet Saves Pirsig From Himself" franchise. Its a tired story. And while I'm sure Krimel thinks HIS enlightened prophet schtick is novel and different, it's really neither.       On a simple level, its confirmation bias, of course. Part of the "enlightened prophet" schtick is to simply reject any and all evidence that challenges your claim. I mean, its not rocket science that in order to make his "enlightened salvation of Pirsig" work he has to openly and aggressively reject Pirsig's text as authority on Pirsig's views. Add a splash of "martyr assaulting the orthodoxy" and pinch of deconstructionism-as-relativism and, as Kirk might say, you have the Kobayashi Maru [a no-win situation or scenario].


dmb says:
Confirmation bias certainly plays a role in this. As Wikipedia will "confirm", confirmation bias leads a person "to favor information that confirms their beliefs or hypotheses. People display this bias when they gather or remember information selectively, or when they interpret it in a biased way. ..They also tend to interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing position" and this bias has "been invoked to explain attitude polarization (when a disagreement becomes more extreme even though the different parties are exposed to the same evidence),.."  This is basically what Pirsig described as "the Cleveland Harbor Effect" and his "full cup" analogy. As I understand, everyone does this to some degree. We do need to conserve our beliefs to some extent, otherwise we'd be easily swayed by any belief that came along, nonsense or not. But too much rigidity, too much bias, is unhealthy as retards one's capacity to learn, grow and change. Sometimes the bias is so strong that you'll see people pull all kinds of stunts when they're confronted with dis-confirming evidence. I'm fairly certain that this explains the behavior we see around here, especially from folks like Marsha and Krimel and all the religious types who've waltzed through here. (This tendency is usually more pronounced in political and religious conservatives.) When I complain about their evasions, I'm talking about those biased stunts. Naturally a heavily biased person is going to be the very worst judge of his own bias. That's why we need feedback from others. That's why we need to take the primary textual evidence seriously [Pirsig's books]. That's why we need illumination from other credible sources, from other philosophers, from encyclopedia and, yes, when things degenerate down to the realm of plain old contradictions, even dictionaries. These are all tools to with which to knock the bias out. It's a kind of reality check that serves as feedback from a neutral third party. These things are supposed to inhibit our ability to maintain delusions and confusions and mistakes. 

That's why Marsha and Krimel won't have any part of that evidence stuff. That's why they have "to openly and aggressively reject Pirsig's text as authority on Pirsig's views.". Apparently, they just don't mind taking this absurd stance wherein the MOQ is just means whatever they want it mean - while at the same time relying on the quotes that confirm what they want. That is quite a stunt. 


Arlo said:
Sadly, this wouldn't need to escalate to the level of hostility, it would be a simple statement for Krimel to say "Pirsig was wrong, and here's what I think is better." Instead we end up with some Pirsig-as-Authority-on-Pirsig-rejecting, salvation-reconstruction that is not just an 'equally valid' interpretation of Pirsig, but the one that rescues the poor author from his own stupidity and timidity (and us along the way). And if that sounds familiar, well, like I said its this year's reboot of the all too familiar franchise.


dmb says:
Yea, hostility is often a symptom of a strong confirmation bias. Challenging these confirmed views are felt as deeply threatening or perceived as a personal attack. The swooping savior syndrome is, I think, just another stunt and it has the added advantage of implying that the self-appointed savior is so clever and wise and profound that he or she is above all that the stupid static stuff, stuff like evidence or the meaning of words and concepts. It's a very ego-boosting response when one has accused of misunderstanding the most basic terms and ideas. Emotionally speaking, this savior act says, "You only THINK that I'm failing first grade because my view is post-Doctoral brilliance that you can't understand." 


There is nothing wrong with a person sincerely attempting to improve on Pirsig. (Although if the attempt was being made by a person who didn't first take the time and effort to learn some philosophy, I'd suspect them of being a bit delusional.) Maybe it's not exactly a logical necessity but I don't see how it could be possible to improve an idea or offer a better alternative to that idea, unless you first understand what that idea means. That's why the swooping savior act is always so implausible. I can see where they've wrong and it's always the core concepts; SOM, MOQ, Quality, Dynamic Quality, static quality. Krimel, Marsha and Bo all have serious problems with the misuse of these terms and they absolutely refuse to be corrected by anyone, not even by Pirsig's text. Marsha, for example, may or may not read the following quote but she will certainly continue to describe static patterns as "ever-changing" regardless of what it obviously means. 


"The Metaphysics of Quality itself is static and should be separated from the Dynamic Quality it talks about. Like the rest of the printed philosophic tradition it doesn't change from day to day, although the world it talks about does."

Hmmm. If the MOQ itself is static and intellectual and morality is served by killing intellectual patterns completely, I guess Pirsig wants us to pull the plug on this discussion group, burn all his books, and never speak of it again. But seriously, Marsha's notion of ever-changing patterns confuses the world, which is ever-changing, with intellectual static patterns, which doesn't change from day to day. 

The opening line of the Tao Te Ching says, "The Tao that can be named is not the true Tao" and in ZAMM he translates this into, "The quality that can be defined is not the Absolute Quality". The Tao, like Quality in ZAMM or DQ in Lila, cannot be named because names are static and Dynamic Quality is not.



Arlo said:
Krimel still hasn't answered with examples of "downside of DQ", but given that expression alone it's a clear rejection (and misunderstanding) of Pirsig's Dynamic Quality. My guess is that Krimel's DQ is "chaos", the destroyer/transformer Shiva, the "darkness" opposite the "light"- since he's adopted the Yin-Yang terminology, and the use of "downside" would indicate a correlation to the Shiva/Vishnu relationship in the Trimurti rather than a mutually positive relation like "masculine/feminine" or "active/passive" or even "sun/moon" in contrast to "light/dark". But let's face it, there is no dialogue here. There is the glorious martyr descending into the mud to rescue the swine.


dmb says:
The first I want to say is, "oink". And yes, that's what it looks like to me too. He's using Pirsig's terms but it has nothing to do with the MOQ. The "DQ" in Krimel's question (what's the downside of DQ) can't mean what Pirisg means by it. That what I tried to show him by substituting the letters "DQ" for a more descriptive alternative like "pre-conceptual experience" or "primary empirical reality". When you put that into Krimel's sentence, one would hope, it is clearly exposed as nonsense. "What is the downside of the primary empirical reality?" "What is the downside of pre-intellectual experience?" He still hasn't explained what this question could possibly mean.

And speaking of evasions, Krimel has many outstanding criticisms and questions still waiting for a real answer. Just going off the top of my head, there is the issue of distinguishing the MOQ from SOM, of distinguishing static from Dynamic, and the issue of translating ZAMM's Quality into Lila's Dynamic Quality. I remember those errors quite easily because they are so basic and central to the larger whole. Getting these issues wrong is going to be a total disaster, presuming that one actually wants to understand the MOQ.

"The Metaphysics of Quality itself is static and should be separated from the Dynamic Quality it talks about. Like the rest of the printed philosophic tradition it doesn't change from day to day, although the world it talks about does."

"Quality is indivisible, undefinable and unknowable in the sense that there is a knower and a known, but a metaphysics can be none of these things. A metaphysics must be divisible, definable and knowable, or there isn't any metaphysics."